Monday, June 2, 2014

PBR Book Club Talks Long Division With Kiese Laymon: "I wanted to write a book that hadn't been written, a book that filled the gaps of my favorite books."

"Ya'll are the perfect readers in a
way for this shit." --Kiese Laymon

I discovered Kiese Laymon's funny, moving, weird, meta, mind-bending novel Long Division via The Believer's list of Best Books of 2013 and promptly convinced several book club readers to tackle it as well, even though it wasn't this month's official selection. Hopefully the following interview will convince you to do the same. Thanks to Kiese for interacting with us on Twitter while we read his book and agreeing to answer some questions about it. Please check out his website Cold Drank and enjoy the interview.

PBR Book Club: Long
Division is a weird book, man! But the oddness feels pretty organic. For instance, the time traveling seems like a great way to
advance some particular views about history and our relationship to it.
Can you talk a little bit about the view of
time and history that you present in the novel? Also, what the hell is
up with that talking cat??

Kiese: Thanks so much for reading that book. In short, the book
adheres to this idea that black Americans have made it wherever we've
made it because of folks willing to time-travel. It's also playing
with the age-old idea of writing being a way of stopping
time, speeding it up, slowing it down, all as a way of making sense of
the noise, or the chaos, the terror. The cat's name is LaVander spelled
backwards. I'm trying to give the reader clues that one of our narrators
is grabbing bits of his "real" life to tell
a "surreal" story. But real, it's the same shit, man. Who knows what's
real in our world? Do you?

PBR Book Club: There’s certainly a postmodern and “meta” tradition in African-American
literature, and much of the methodology seems well-suited to writing
about the African-American experience, yet it seems that these
terms are more often associated with contemporary
novels from hip young white dudes these days. Can you talk a little
about the various techniques and theories at work in Long Division and
why they’re well-suited to your purposes?

Kiese: That's a great question. Man, besides shit like Borges and
DFW and White Boy Shuffle, that book is wholly inspired by Southern
Hip Hop, and particularly the group Outkast. Besides being the dopest
group of my lifetime, they play so effectively
with what we call meta and postmodernism. They write rhymes about
writing rhymes. They talk about the ways black folk are the mules and
martians of this nation. The book begins with a quote from Andre 3000
from Outkast, "Twice upon a time, there was a boy
who died and lived happily ever after, but that's another chapter." So
yeah, before I read any of what you call hip white boy meta shit, I was
listening to rappers rap about rapping and I'm such a mark for that
shit.

PBR Book Club: Our librarian friend Bananasuit is a rap fan, and she’s been having a blast
stumbling upon some embedded (but not always acknowledged) lyrics in
Long Division. Tell us a little about the decision to do this, and
maybe also talk a little about the importance of
music in the novel and/or as an influence on your writing.

Kiese: Oh wow. Maybe my favorite question ever. Well, there's so
much music in the book, and so much musicality, but I also wanted to
embed a lot of the influences in the text, in ways that only folk really
invested in hop hop would see, hear, read,
get. There's so much shit in there, man. There's a good amount of
Kendrick Lamar, too, because that's really what I was listening to when I
was revising. And again, his GKMC album is also one of those meta
productions that doesn't run away from real real consequences,
and the real discursive consequences, of the nation failing young
black characters in this country.

PBR Book Club: PBR Book Club has been known to make mixtapes featuring tracks that
appear in books we’ve read or perhaps just tracks that seem to
correspond with a book’s tone or themes. What are a couple of tunes
that should absolutely make it onto our Long Division mix?

Kiese: Oh man, my friend Regina Bradley made the perfect Long
Division mixtape. A lot of the songs are actually listed in the book:
"Monsters in the Night," KRIT's "Something," Mahalia Jackson's "How I Got
Over," Outkast's "The Art of Storytelling (Dre's
verse)," Outkast's "Hey Ya," Maxwell's "Pretty Wings," and a lot of my Aunt
Sue's long meter hymns. Great question, man. Thank you. Oh, also
Cassandra Wilson's version of "Time After Time."

PBR Book Club: I laughed out loud numerous times while reading the book, often at
individual sentences that were simultaneously really lyrical and
ultra-slangy/raunchy. I like this one: “I felt on Toni’s bra in a dark
closet in Art and she twerked on my sack a few times after
school.” Do you have an absolute favorite laugh line from the novel?

Kiese: Man, my favorite line is so boring. "That felt like love
to me" is still my favorite line in the book. But as far as a series of
sentences, I like when '85 city is in 2013 and he's talking about his
queer friend Rozier. The 10 or 11 sentences he
uses to describe that dude and his use of language make me the
happiest, I think. I also like the first line a lot. "LaVander Peeler
cares to much what what folks think about him." It lets you know, if
you're listening, that you're about to read a story about
the consequences of centering whiteness in our lives.

PBR Book Club: I feel like there’s probably a lot of literary echoes in the book that
I’m missing, and others that I’m maybe projecting onto it. For
instance, near the end, when Lavander Peeler pops back into the novel and Pot Belly
is tied up in the shed, I was suddenly reminded of
Tom Sawyer’s reappearance at the end of Huck Finn and the boys’ plan to
free Jim. Is this an intentional parallel? And can you talk about a
few others.

Kiese: Oh my god! Dude! Dude! Ya'll are the perfect readers in a
way for this shit. There was an overkill line where LaVander says that it reminds him of the end of Huck Finn, but I
thankfully took that line out. So much of that
book is bouncing around a number of novels. Jesmyn Ward alludes to a
hole in the ground in her work. I'm playing with that. I'm, of course,
vibing with Invisible Man and Bluest Eye a lot in that book. There's
this book Paddy Clark, Ha Ha Ha that I'm messing
around with too. Thematically, I wouldn't have a book without The White
Boy Shuffle, Beloved and the Fire Next Time. But ultimately, I wanted
to write a book that hadn't been written, a book that filled the gaps of
my favorite books.

PBR Book Club: As a former southerner myself (I grew up in Arkansas), I have to include
at least one question about the South. I’ve noticed that some writers
distance themselves from the “Southern writer” label, but you seem to
have absolutely embraced the designation, saying
that you “write to and from a group of people that a lot of other
American writers neglect.” Despite the long tradition of great
Southern literature, why do you think the region and its readers still
get neglected?

Kiese: I don't even know how to answer that other than to say
northerners are kind of wack and small minded sometimes. They dance to
our music, speak the language we broke, bended, and snared and then don't
wanna give our region any credit because we're
kinda terrible sometimes. But I am what I am, you know? I know that
more southern kids will embrace the word and make that shit do some
crazy shit if more of us stop running away from what made us. I don't
know, man. I like words and I love stories but I have
zero reverence from New York or anything Northeastern. Nothing. I'm not
hating, but I just think I'm from the richest story-sharing place on
earth. I'm responsible to that place and it's responsible for me.

PBR Book Club: Long Division, for me, is a book that left me saying: “I’ll read
whatever this guy does next.” So what’s next in terms of your fiction?
And do you see yourself as continuing to balance fiction and
non-fiction publication in your career.

Kiese: Aw man, I'm working this absolutely frightening novel called , "And So
On" and a book called "309: A Fat Black Memoir." I'm just working and
reading and trying to be an honest, compassionate, and effective person.
That's pretty much all I got for now. Thank you so much for giving those characters and those places any of your time.